The Bourne Revelation: Cinematic Parapolitical Insights

In previous pieces I’ve explored movies as potential sources of insight into parapolitical (“deep state”) realities, the technical term for which is “revelation of the method.” Hidden truths about our social, political (and even spiritual) world are placed in the public eye though slightly cockeyed so as not to be so obviously blatant lens but nevertheless significant clues are given with just the right frame of reference. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a limited hangout. I’ve previously explored one such revelation of the method concerning the metaverse in the film Free Guy.

This piece (and the subsequent one) will explore the four Jason Bourne movies staring Matt Damon (there was a fifth film in the series starring Jeremy Renner as well). This piece will cover the first two Bourne films: The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy. The second piece will cover the other two Bourne films: The Bourne Ultimatum and Jason Bourne.

Woven throughout the plots of these films are a series of revelations of deep state covert activity. I will only focus on the deep state/parapolitical elements in each film and not all plot elements. These pieces will stand in relationship to Ezekiel73’s amazing series on The Network. Those pieces explore the real-life historical development and evolution the deep state (or perhaps deep states plural). These films intersect with that history at multiple points as we’ll see. I'll reference a parapolitical truth revealed through the film, then explore that parapolitical data point after which I'll return to the film analysis.

The Bourne Identity

The plot of the first Bourne film centers on the amnesiac protagonist of the film Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) and his attempt to evade police and assassins, while along the way recovering his true identity. At the beginning of the film, a fishing vessel off the coast of France rescues an mentally foggy Bourne from the waters where he’s been shot with no recollection of how he got in the water or why he was attacked.

Swiss Banking, Nazis, and The CIA

Embedded in Bourne’s hip is a small electronic device which emits a Swiss bank account number. We see here our first deep state elements: body modification methods with digital surveillance and Swiss bank accounts.

Bourne travels to Zurich to investigate the bank account. The Swiss Bank account element references an entry history of nefarious Swiss banking activity: e.g. stories of Nazi gold held in Swiss bank accounts (or rather gold looted by Nazis from Jews and other minority populations).

Switzerland is also the home of The Bank of International Settlements (BIS). The BIS was originally set up to coordinate German reparation payments after World War I (much more on interwar Germany to come so please note this point). The BIS became, in time, the Central Bank of Central Banks.

The Bank remained officially neutral during World War II though in practice coordinated banking activities during the war years across Allied and Axis powers. Towards the end of the war the Bank's chairman was American Thomas McKittrick, aka "Hitler's American Banker".

Switzerland’s unique politically neutral status within Europe allowed it to be a haven for Allied and Axis power financial realities. Switzerland also became a place of espionage for both sides in WWII.

McKittrick also was a close friend of Allen Dulles and while stationed in Switzerland also did espionage work for the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), the forerunner to the CIA.

Speaking of Allen Dulles, the first civilian head of the CIA, was originally station chief of the aforementioned CIA predecessor organization, The OSS, in Bern and later Zurich, Switzerland. It was in that post that Dulles made deals with remaining elements of the Nazi regime that were instrumental in the post-war Fascist International as I covered in two previous pieces.

Operation Paperclip—the incorporation of “former” Nazi scientists into the US industrial sphere was a key element here. Paperclip—as detailed in Ezekiel73’s piece on the weaponization of social scientific research—becomes the source of what will later become the human experiments of MK-Ultra, much of which took place under Dulles’ CIA leadership. Dulles also made a deal with Nazi SS Gen. Reinhard Gehlen, head of Nazi espionage for the Eastern front against the Soviets. The “Gehlen org”, as it came to be known, was essentially wholesale in-sourced to become the CIA’s Eastern European espionage division. The Gehlen org became the backbone of West Germany’s intelligence apparatus, which in turn became core to the development of NATO’s intelligence agencies. From NATO and various fascist groups we get the tradition of Operation Gladio and the “stay behind” operations. Former fascists were the boots on the ground in the assassination of Mossadeq in the CIA-backed Iranian coup of 1953 (when Dulles was CIA Director).

Members of the Gehlen org have also been implicated by a number of researchers studying the JFK assassination. Dulles was infamously public harangued and fired by President Kennedy for the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Disturbingly, Dulles was later one of the members of the Warren Commission, ostensibly set up to investigate the murder of the President, but more likely as a means to cover up and whitewash the conspiracy behind his killing. In that capacity, Dulles kept deleted from the record of the Commission’s proceedings, Dulles' own personal connections (via his mistress) to Ruth and Michael Paine, who were hosting Marina & Lee Harvey Oswald and got Lee Harvey his job at the Texas book depository.

Dulles was after all originally a corporate lawyer for an East Coast financial firm: Sullivan and Cromwell. The firm came to national prominence for its role in lobbying on behalf of Panama and not Nicaragua as the site of a canal to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Cromwell received the largest sum ever paid at that point to a lawyer.

From the very beginning the intersection between covert intelligence agencies and their connection to terrorist groups—an alliance core to The Network—is in service of global corporate financial interests. In Allen Dulles we see all those threads woven togehter in a braid. All of that history, intentionally or unintentionally, is brought into play through Bourne’s electronic device with a Swiss bank account.

Confessions of an Economic MKUltra Hitman

Returning to the film, Bourne makes it to his safety deposit box at the bank in which he finds numerous passports with multiple identities, a gun, and an immense store of cash in various currencies. An asset at the bank calls into a division within the CIA called Operation Treadstone to inform them of Bourne’s arrival. We learn that Treadstone is a hidden project within the CIA and its opaque to the wider Washington D.C. federal government.

It's crucial to stress just how compartmentalized these types of operations really are in actual history. As Ezekiel73 stated it in this most recent piece on the Network:

William Colby took over as CIA director in 1973 while Operation CHAOS was still ongoing and was tasked with looking into it. He later wrote this incredible statement in his memoir- “I found it impossible to do much about whatever was wrong with [CHAOS]. Its super-secrecy and extreme compartmentalization kept me very much on its periphery”. It was secret- to the head of the CIA itself!

Just so in the film, Operation Treadstone is known only to The CIA Director, Deputy Director (Ward Abbott), and Operational Chief of Treadstone (Alexander Conklin). What was distinct about Treadstone was that operatives were simply given orders but were able themselves—as lone gunmen—to develop their own strategies for how to complete those missions. In this manner the program needed a skeleton crew of logistical support and created plausible deniability and a reduced likelihood of leaks. The program hinged on the idea that the agents were so deeply programmed by their psychological conditioning that they could be trusted to exist for no other reason than to carry out missions. They were to be ghosts haunting their targets and then disappearing again into the walls.

Bourne heads to the US consulate and then escapes capture. Bourne—without self-conscious awareness—is able to read a room, plan and execute an escape. His training—which as we’ll learn later was through experimental torture and MKUltra style programming methods—is so deep in his being they activate spontaneously, even while he has no memory of who he is.

Bourne meets up with Marie Kruetz, who was denied a visa at the US Consulate. He offers her money to drive him. A series of events take place—including an attempt on Bourne’s life by another Treadstone agent. Bourne eventually learns that he was sent on a mission to kill exiled Nigerian dictator Nkywanna Wombosi. Wombosi had been put into power by a CIA-back coup but was eventually overthrown, currently exileed in France. Wombosi threatened to expose CIA secret activity across the African continent, which is why Bourne was tasked with his assassination—which was meant to look as if one of his bodyguards had committed the murder.

John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is one of the core texts that explores this arc of the story. Perkins details the history of economic colonialism, especially through groups like the IMF and World Bank. Third world countries would be forced to privatize their land, water, oil, gas, and mineral resources under the premise of joining the world economic order. Leaders who did not participate in the consensus were often found in compromising situations and/or directly threatened.

The Coup against democratically-elected socialist Chilean president Salvador Allende (1973) is a classic example in this regard. Torture tactics learned in the MK-Ultra program were used to gruesome effect. Allende’s assassination was carried on CIA orders by “former” fascist elements who had fled to South America after the war. The CIA installed fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet to replace Allende. Pinochet then followed the early forms of deregulation, influenced by Milton Friedman among other economists, in what Naomi Klein famously named The Shock Doctrine. The template of assassinating a socialist leader, privatizing the countries natural resources, using “ex” fascists, and installing a dictatorial regime was set in the previously mentioned 1953 Iranian coup, largely at the behest of British Petroleum. For more on this story see Ezekiel73's post on the subject.

Back to the movie, Wombosi goes public with the claim that the failed attack on his life was due to the CIA and he threatens to publicize his knowledge of their dirty secrets in Africa—all as a ploy to get him back into power. Operation Treadstone chief Conklin orders one of the other Treadstone agents to finish the job Bourne was supposed to have done, which he does as Wombosi is murdered in his home.

One of Bourne’s other fake identities was that of a John Michael Kane. Kane had presented himself to a Maritime Security Alliance, ostensibly as a businessman looking for security solutions for his own yacht. In reality, Bourne (aka Kane) was gathering intelligence on Wombosi and his own yacht—Wombosi being another client of Maritime Security.

A maritime security firm points to yet another tentacle of the octopus, namely that of international trade/business being a front for criminal enterprises and/or covert intelligence operations (or both). Aristotle Onassis would be an illustrative example of this tendency (which through his later marriage to Jackie Kennedy brings back the JFK storyline).

The lines between the transnational institutions like the IMF and World Bank, debt slavery, international commerce as a front for organized crime, organized crime intersecting with intelligence agencies, all flow in a disturbingly seamless manner through the film.

The first film ends with Bourne confronting his erstwhile boss Alexander Conklin and through Conklin’s explanation comes to remember the events surrounding his assassination attempt on Wombosi. Bourne got onto Wombosi’s boat and was just about to kill him when he noticed Wombosi’s children sleeping with him in the cabin. Bourne tells Conklin he’s leaving the program and not follow him. He escapes and the film ends with him re-uniting with Marie.

Ward Abbott—who becomes a key player in the sequel—goes before Congress to say that Treadstone was a failed program and it’s being shut down, only to be replaced by another secret program named Blackbriar.

The Bourne Supremacy

Within each film in the series, Bourne begins to have flashbacks to different events in his past. In this film Bourne has flashbacks to an event in Berlin though the memory is incomplete and fuzzy—all a consequence of his trauma-induced mind control programming. We learn that other Treadstone agents complained of ongoing migraines, difficulty driving at night (for which medication was prescribed), and intense emotional mood swings. Those are all classic symptoms of ongoing post-traumatic stress disorder, including even partial memory stored in the body as detailed in traumatologist Peter Levine’s book In An Unspoken Voice: How The Body Releases Trauma as well as Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score.

The fuller details of the MKUltra-esque nature of Bourne’s programming begin to be revealed in this film and are fully explained in the third film (Bourne Ultimatum). In the Bourne novels, by author Robert Ludlum, which are the basis for the movies, Operation Treadstone comes out of Vietnam. As Ezekiel73 detailed in his most recent piece on The Network Vietnam was a “technowar”, even a “psychowar.” Vietnam became the testing ground for all manner of brutal torture, psychological conditioning, weather modification experiments, and black operations. In this regard, the books were very historically accurate to depict Treadstone as growing out of Vietnam. The books further state that the program was created in light of congressional activity in the 1970s trying to reign in the CIA and bring them back within the control of the constitutional republic. That point too has real-life parallels.

At the beginning of the second film, Bourne and Marie have been on the run for two years. They are hiding out in Goa, India. A Russian assassin makes an attempt on Bourne’s life. Bourne survives while Marie is killed. The same Russian assassin shows up separately to foil a CIA operation to recover files concerning a murdered Russian reformist politician named Vladimir Neski. These files are said to have information about $20 million in CIA funds that went missing seven years prior.

The assassin (Kirill) murders the CIA agent and Russian informant, steals the files, and then plants fingerprints belonging to Jason Bourne at the scene. Kirill is an agent of The FSB, the successor to the KGB. Kirill is working at the behest of Russian oil tycoon Yuri Gretkov. Eventually we learn that Gretkov received the $20 million from CIA Deputy Director Ward Abbott through a secret slush fund. These funds allowed Gretkov to take control of Russian oil interests along the Caspian Sea. Vladmir Neski, the assassinated reformist Russian politician, was an advocate of state-control of the oil sector and therefore opposed to privatization. For this reason the CIA, through Operation Treadstone, had Neski murdered. It was Bourne’s first assignment in Treadstone. Neski’s wife was unexpectedly in the room (just like Wombosi’s children) and Bourne made the scene to appear like a murder-suicide by Mrs. Neski. Yet again, another confession of an economic hitman, with the CIA-Banking-Big Oil nexus continuing its longstanding history.

The plot of this film is a bit more complex than the first one but is very revealing and ultra relevant in the current moment. There’s a great deal to unpack here. To understand all this we first need to look at post WWI Germany. Synchromystically or otherwise, the Neski murders take place in Berlin. Earlier in the piece I mentioned the Bank of International Setlements and how it was originally designed to coordinate German reparation payments from World War I. Here we pick back up that historical thread, which will eventually bring us to understanding the current hostitlies between Russia, The Ukraine, and the West.

I’ve covered some of this terrain, especially the Russian angle, in my previous pieces exploring Donald Trump and his longstanding deep state ties—including to the Russian deep state.

At The Treaty of Versailles (attended by both Allen Dulles and his brother, later Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles), Germany was made to pay heavy reparations. The disastrous war plus the economic burden of debt repayment resulted in a spiraling inflationary crisis in the German economy. The original Versailles Treaty and its later amendment (known as the Dawes Plan)  were in essence a porto-version of the later IMF-backed debt for land deals mentioned earlier with reference to John Perkins.

Whitney Webb and co-author Iain Davis have begun a series exploring how the UN Sustainable Development Goals (aka Agenda 2030) follow the exact same template now being sold as way of saving the planet, but instead becoming another angle for corporate domination.

A number of British and US financial and banking interests profited heavily from shady business dealings during the economic crisis of early 1920s Germany. Franklin Roosevelt, later US President, was one such figure. While not every such vulture capitalist ended up supporting the rise of the Nazi party, this initial Anglo-American foray into the German postwar economy did set the stage for those who would, most infamously Henry Ford. As Antony Sutton showed, US and British investment in funding the Nazi party was immense: GE and IBM (along with Ford) to name just a few.

The aforementioned John Foster Dulles—the namesake of the Washington D.C. airport—forced his German-based law firm employees to sign every document Heil Hitler until his law partners forced him to close the German branch in 1935! That law firm? You guessed it an international branch of Sullivan and Cromwell. Foster Dulles was a major architect (as a lawyer for a financial firm remember) of the Dawes Plan.

This period—particularly the 1920s—became known as the Rape of Germany. It was a proto-version of The Shock Doctrine. I mention the Rape of Germany because it was the template for the 1990s Rape of Russia, which brings us back to the plot of the second Bourne movie.

As the Soviet Union was collapsing in the late 1980s, elite Anglo-American (and broader Western) interests greedily eyed the possibility of marauding the post-Soviet Russian era to come. Initially, President George HW Bush publicly proclaimed that NATO would not expand into Eastern Europe and then immediately reneged on that promise. Bush and the Bush family had major economic dealings in the post-Soviet Russian era.

US economist Jeffrey Sachs, was the main architect of the “shock therapy” (shock doctrine ) transition from the communist system to a global market economy. The Russian economy tanked, leading to famine and widespread crime and chaos. During that period of chaos, Russian oligarchs and crime lords came to power. Russian President Boris Yeltsin was deep in the pockets of the international network/syndicate who stripped Russian natural resources and communist-era technology, enriching themselves in the process (including again the Bush family). Sachs is currently Director for the Center of Sustainable Development at Columbia University, as well as President of UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, showing yet again the link between the shock doctrine and sustainable development/Agenda 2030.  

In the film, the CIA-backed Russian oligarch Yuri Gretkov, represents the Russian oligarchs and mafia who were cozy with the West: e.g. Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Interestingly Gretkov’s asset in the film, Kirill, is an FSB agent. The KGB, the predecessor to the FSB, is of course is where Vladimir Putin first rose to prominence. Putin briefly held the position of head of the FSB under then President Boris Yeltsin.

Vladimir Neski, in the film, was said to a be Russian democratic reformist politician and in favor of control Russian oil. Like with Mosaddegh and Allende in real life, Neski had to go.

The Network deeply wanted to control post-Soviet Russia. Under Yeltsin that had enormous control and influence, even as Russia descended into chaos. Putin rose to power by either making deals with the oligarchs and crime bosses or eliminating those who opposed him.

Putin then brutally established law and order and sought to slowly regain territory from the Soviet era—first quelling the revolt in Chechnya, instigating a war with Georgia, then annexing Crimea, intervening in Syria, and culminating in the current war in The Ukraine.

Putin’s Russia, in other words, created its own antithetical deep state to the Anglo-American one. It, like its Anglo-American counterpart, exists at the nexus of intelligence agencies and organized crime. Those two deep states, like mafia families, are at war with each other under the surface, like tectonic plates moving the geopolitical order. The above ground states of the US and Russia inch closer and closer to all war with each other, especially via the proxy war between the two in The Ukraine.  

In my pieces on Donald Trump I also explored his longstanding dalliance and intersection with multiple forms of organized crime: New York real estate, casinos, Hollywood, and the Russian mob/intelligence deep state. Trump’s connection to organized crime flow through his political mentor Roy Cohn, one-time chief legal counsel to Joseph McCarthy during the McCarthy hearings and later the go-to lawyer for the New York & New Jersey mafia (a real life Better Call Saul).

The Bourne Supremacy culminates interestingly with Bourne traveling to Russia to apologize personally to the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Neski. Bourne gets a confession out of Abbott who then takes his own life.

In the next piece in this series I'll look at the events following in the subsequent two Bourne films: The Bourne Ultimatum and Jason Bourne. Along the way we'll discover the military seeding of Silicon Valley; the alchemical roots of MKUltra mind control techniques; and the real life embodiment of Operations Treadstone and Blackbriar in Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).